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Video Games and Behavioral Modification
 
 New technological methods help foster self-esteem.
 Anyone who’s ever been snapped at by someone having a bad day knows that feelings of insecurity lead people to behave in ways that might be deemed aggressive. PsychologistMark Baldwin of McGill University says that insecurity, bullying behavior, and so on areemotional reactions that happen “automatically — extremely quickly, and without youwanting them or being able to control them.” He and his students have come up with asurprising answer to help people develop “more positive automatic patterns of thought,”namely video games.Through what he’s calling the Self-Esteem Initiative, Baldwin and his students havecreated a series of video games that aim to trick the human brain into forming morepositive mental images and encouraging a healthier emotional state. The research hingeson neuroscience and fMRI brain scanning breakthroughs that show the effects of isolation, rejection, and despair on the physical brain.“Some researchers are beginning to use fMRI to examine the neural correlates of socialevents,” he says. “One study, for example, found that the pain of social rejection seems toactivate the same area of the brain as does physical pain. … Other researchers havedeveloped a laboratory paradigm to measure aggressiveness. The participant is insultedby a confederate of the experimenter, and later is given the chance to blast theconfederate with a loud noise, supposedly during a learning task. The question tomeasure aggressiveness is, How loud and how long would you like to make the noiseblast? In our study, we simply asked participants to imagine being in this kind of situation, and to then answer the same question about how noxious a blast of noise theywould like to administer to the person who had insulted and rejected them.”So, if rejection and insecurity stemming from common experiences … being treatedrudely in a waiting room, being denied entry into art school, or being called short … cancause a person to blast a loud noise at someone or wage a land war in Europe, what canscience do to fix this? Aren’t rejection and insecurity unavoidable aspects of life?Baldwin acknowledges that no one can avoid bad feelings or social rejection forever, butpeople can lessen the effects that these experiences have on the brain through systematicself-reprogramming. He calls this “psychological practice” and says that the idea came tohim one day while he was playing Tetris.Tetris famously calls on the player to assemble falling shapes into solid blocks before toomany of them stack up. Baldwin is something of an avid player but says he was terrible atfirst. Before long, the game came to feel automatic, so much so that, even after he put thegame down, his mind would see the world in terms of rotating shapes he had to piecetogether. He started looking at parking spaces differently. He reorganized his closets. Herealized that, if a video game could program his brain to be more spatially aware, otherpeople might be able to use video games to meliorate feelings of rejection, isolation, orinsecurity.
 
So far, the Self-Esteem Initiative is offering three games on its Web site: Grow YourChi!, EyeSpy: The Matrix, and WHAM! Self-Esteem Conditioning. All of them “leadplayers to practice specific mental operations over and over. These operations aredesigned to foster positive mental habits to give an automatic sense of security,” Baldwinexplains. “Pairing any two experiences together over and over can — as with Pavlov’sdog — create an association between them so that thinking about one tends to activatethoughts about the other.”For instance, in WHAM! the player clicks on words that appear in different parts of thecomputer screen. Sometimes the word is the player’s own name. Whenever the playerclicks on his or her name, a smiling, accepting face appears for a half a second.“Theoretically, this should create an automatic association between ‚myself’ and‘acceptance,’ leading to a mental habit whereby thinking of oneself automatically bringsto mind images of warm social acceptance,” Baldwin says.Does it work? Baldwin’s research has found a measurable improvement in self-esteemamong subjects who played the game for about five minutes. “We also asked them toimagine a situation in which someone insulted and rejected them, and then to say howmuch they would want to hurt that person: Those participants who had played the self-acceptance conditioning game were less aggressive, compared to a control condition.” —
Patrick Tucker 
 
Source: Mark Baldwin interview. To play the Self-Esteem Initiative games, go tohttp://selfesteemgames.mcgill.ca/games/index.htm. 
 
 
Be Your Own Big Brother
 
Call it Web-based personal fitness, or maybe Vanity 2.0: In January 2009, a SiliconValley start-up called Fitbit will release a wireless system that allows people to track andmonitor intimate physical information about themselves and then upload that info to apublicly viewable Web site. The system consists of a hair-clip sized wearable device, theFitbit Tracker, which monitors its owner’s steps, exercise levels, calories, and sleeppatterns.“The Tracker uses motion-sensing technology to precisely capture all moment-to-moment physical activity throughout the day and night. It also measures sleep quality toprovide a holistic view of a 24-hour period,” according to a statement.At the click of a button, calories, steps, and distance are illuminated and displayed on theTracker. “In addition to these numerical measurements, the Tracker also displays a user’sprogress toward [his or her] goals in the form of an avatar that changes as a user advancestoward or falls behind [his or her] goals,” reads the statement. The biggest differencebetween the Fitbit and a standard pedometer is that the Fitbit allows people to track theirown fitness progress online with friends, family, and co-workers, or even strangers. Userscan also input nutrition, weight, and other data onto the Web site to gain a “compeltepicture of their health.”
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